Top Tech Companies Press Obama on NSA Surveillance, After Federal Judge Calls It "Almost Certainly" Unconstitutional

Amid pushback from tech companies and a federal judge calling the surveillance efforts by the National Security Agency "almost certainly" unconstitutional, President Obama met with top technology executives on Tuesday. The discussion was purportedly to be about Obama's "tech surge" to fix the problems plaguing Healthcare.gov, but tech executives had a different topic in mind.

The meeting began cordially in front of White House press cameras, but inside the private meeting, some of the top executives from companies like Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and others used the opportunity to bend the president's ear about NSA surveillance.

"We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform," said a joint statement from the executives after the meeting, according to the Wall Street Journal. The White House issued a statement saying that President Obama "will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals intelligence programs." 

Tech Companies Push Back

The principles referred to were published last week in a open letter urging for a ban on bulk data collection of internet communications and other reforms in order to restore the public's trust in the internet. The letter was signed by AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo:

"The undersigned companies believe that it is time for the world's governments to address the practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information.

While the undersigned companies understand that governments need to take action to protect their citizens' safety and security, we strongly believe that current laws and practices need to be reformed.

Consistent with established global norms of free expression and privacy and with the goals of ensuring that government law enforcement and intelligence efforts are rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight, we hereby call on governments to endorse the following principles and enact reforms that would put these principles into action."

The companies posted the proposed principles on a new website called Global Government Surveillance Reform. They include a ban on bulk data collection, limitations on the ability of governments to compel companies to disclose specific user data, respecting users' "reasonable privacy interests," a clear, legal framework with strong checks and balances for intelligence agencies seeking information, and an independent court review process that includes a representative advocating against the intelligence agencies' wishes.

The companies also endorse government transparency on surveillance and demand looser rules for tech companies wanting to disclose government demands for user information, along with asking for an international legal framework to govern data requests across boarders.

Judge Rules NSA Collection Unconstitutional

Just a day before President Obama met with captains of the tech industry, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Washington D.C. ruled that the NSA's collection of phone records - the so-called "metadata" about incoming and outgoing calls, which the NSA is known to collect from hundreds of millions in the U.S. without warrants - "almost certainly" unconstitutional. On top of that, Judge Richard Leon's opinion calls the NSA's bulk collection program "almost Orwellian technology."

The judge was ruling in a civil lawsuit from Larry Klayman, a conservative laywer with Freedom Watch against the U.S. government for violating his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches. The ruling, however, was instantly stayed by Leon himself, pending an expected government appeal. This is the first time since ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents exposing various NSA surveillance efforts that the agency's metadata collection program was called into question by a federal judge's ruling.